In writing about the Asian Tsunami of December 2004 in The Guardian,
Catherine Bennett noted:

Why, many formerly trusting followers of horoscopes may be asking, was this colossal event not presaged in the stars? Or, failing that, in someone's palm, crystal ball, tea leaves or chicken's entrails? How, in the circumstances, are they to carry on believing? If an event such as this can go unpredicted by leading, professional astrologers, could it mean the whole edifice of astrology is an abject superstition? That the constellations are not, as previously advertised, heavenly guides to life on Earth, but as indifferent, and as meaningless as "a patch of curiously shaped damp on the bathroom ceiling" (as Richard Dawkins once, unforgettably put it) ...

Karl Popper wrote about astrology:

Astrologers were greatly impressed, and misled, by what they believed to be confirming evidence - so much so that they were quite unimpressed by any unfavorable evidence. Moreover, by making their interpretations and prophesies sufficiently vague they were able to explain away anything that might have been a refutation of the theory had the theory and the prophesies been more precise. In order to escape falsification they destroyed the testability of their theory. It is a typical soothsayer's trick to predict things so vaguely that the predictions can hardly fail: that they become irrefutable."

Is this the way that the world at large feels about astrology, horoscopes,
tarot cards and the like? We will now look at some survey results from the
2004 TGI study. This is a survey of 5,312 persons between the ages of 12
to 64 years old conducted in Brazil during 2004. We will first consider
the incidence of people reading the horoscope in their weekday or weekend
newspapers. The chart below shows the incidences separately by
socio-economic level, education and age/sex groups. At first blush, this
is going against our expectations. Why is horoscope reading more common
among the upper class than the lower class? And why would people with
Doctorate and Master degrees read horoscopes more than people who never
completed primarily school?

(source: TGI Brasil)

Here, we have to remind ourselves that "reading horoscopes in
newspapers" is really a two-stage process. Stage 1: You have to go
and obtain a newspaper. Stage 2: When you open up the newspaper, you have
to go to the horoscope section. The chart above shows the net effect of
the two stages. But what we broke the process them by stage. In the
next chart below, we show the incidences of newspaper reading (either a weekday
or weekend edition of any newspaper) by the same groups. As we expected,
newspaper readers increases with socio-economic level, educational level and
age.

(source: TGI Brasil)

In the next chart, we show the incidences of horoscope reading within the
newspaper readers. This is the stage two result, expressed as a
conditional probability. Now, the results are more consistent with
expectations: the reading of horoscopes decreases by socio-economic level and
educational level.

(source: TGI Brasil)

Nowadays, there is another way by which the media provides horoscope
readings: the Internet. The first chart shows the overall incidences of
reading horoscopes on the Internet by socio-economic level, educational level and
age/sex. By this time, we know what happens and so we will quickly move on
to the breakdown of the stages.

(source: TGI Brasil)

The next chart shows the stage 1 results. As we expected, Internet
usage is increases by socio-economic level and educational level but decreases
by age.

(source: TGI Brasil)

And finally, in the last chart, we have the conditional
probabilities of reading horoscopes given that one is an Internet user.
For socio-economic level, the incidences are essentially flat. For
educational level, it decreases with more education.

(source: TGI Brasil)

This small exercise may not have enlightened the world about
astrology, horoscopes and all that. But it illustrates the role of the
media as gatekeeper. When the media entail some characteristics (such as
literacy or economic cost) that do not allow universal access, then an
inequality in information access results. Denial of access to horoscopes
may not be so an urgent social issue, but what about access to job opportunities,
educational learning, and so on?